Status Updates From Index, A History of the: A ...

Conrad Gessner makes that pivot: "Truly, it seems to me that, life being so short, indexes to books should be considered as absolutely necessary by those who are engaged in a variety of studies . . . whether one will be reminded of something one has read before, or so that one might find something new for the first time. Because of the carelessness of some who rely only on the indexes . . ."

so far, super good

"...two versions of the same idea, arising simultaneously, one in Oxford, one in Paris. Taken together, both can tell us something about the index in our present, twenty-first-century moment, the Age of Search. Between them, they set up the axes by which we think about indexing: word versus concept; concordance versus subject index; specific versus universal."